One of things we are told we have to do when we start working the 1st step is accept our alcoholism. There’s a fabulous page in the Big Book (it used to be p.449, I think it’s p.417 now) that says, ‘Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.’ When I was new, people were constantly telling me to read that page. Acceptance, acceptance, acceptance…

It used to make me really angry, because like most newcomers, accepting my addiction (or anything else in my life) was not high on my priority list and I found it difficult to see how acceptance was going to fix the fact that I had real problems…like being broke, like needing a place to live, like all the people who had thrown up their hands in desperation and walked out of my life. Since being new, I have sat in many meetings on acceptance, and I always hear it is always put (during discussions) into an emotional context. For example:

“I have to accept my alcoholism, but I don’t have to like it.”

“I am accepting success as it comes, but it feels uncomfortable.”

I had a sponsor when I was new (the nasty one!) who used to bark out that another phrase for acceptance was WELCOME TO REALITY. Acceptance is nothing more than being fully aware and present of what is real in any given moment. It is what it is. I don’t like that I worked for ten hours on a proposal for someone last week, putting aside all my other responsibilities and that they haven’t had the courtesy to call me back. SO WHAT? I don’t like it. But that has nothing to do with acceptance. I can roll around in that emotional attachment if that’s what I want to do. Sometimes I do that. But more often that not these days, I try not to have an emotional attachment to my reality…why? Because I have experienced that there is a greater power at work in my life and that everything is exactly as it is meant to be, whether I understand it or not.

It is what it is.

When you get there, it’s easy to work the 1st step. Here is the reality of my physical, financial, emotional, spiritual life today. Here is where it’s working. Here is where it’s unmanageable.

It is what it is. SO WHAT, NOW WHAT?

How you feel about reality is irrelevant (in A.A.). That’s a therapy thing. If you want to explore your feelings or dwell in your inner child and how you got to where you got, that’s fine…I have no problem with that. But it’s not A.A. Alcoholics Anonymous is a program of action. It’s the SO WHAT, NOW WHAT. Moving on…don’t get stuck…don’t stay here (in what’s unmanageable or in what you aren’t pleased with.)

Move on for God’s sake. And for your own. You can always come back to therapy, but for now, just act right. That’s it. It’s that simple. When I started really living in the idea that it is what it is, and I began to make acceptance a part of my daily practice. When acceptance becomes a spiritual tool (and it will, if you practice it) the natural next right thing is to ask ourselves SO WHAT, NOW WHAT?

Okay, they don’t walk into a bar…but today’s post is about a Hindu goddess, and her name is Akhilanda. She’s the goddess of ‘Never not broken’ and she’s an amazing introduction into talking about the 1st step.

You know that feeling when you just woke up in your own puke or you suddenly realize that you forgot you mother’s birthday? They used to call it incomprehensible demoralization when I was new…but I don’t hear that term as much anymore. Anyway, you’re lying on your bedroom floor and you feel completely broken.

Well, according to the elephant Journal’s JC Peters, in that moment, you are more powerful than you’ve ever been. In her article on Akhilanda, she talks (from a Hindu perspective) about what we in A.A. call surrender, or the 1st step. As I was telling a friend in a meeting last week, I am the most powerful when I am completely broken. It takes that moment of brokenness to get me to give up all remaining hope that I have the answer to my problem. And then, in coming attractions, that’s when the a power greater than myself can actually have some wiggle room to work in my life.

It’s not the kind of broken that tears you down to humiliate you. It’s the kind of broken that tears you apart, and therein is Akhilanda’s (and the sober alcoholics’) real power. In pieces, we can begin to put things back together in a different picture…a picture that reflects more accurately who we want to be and what we want life to look like. Hopefully we do this with a mindfulness of aligning our ambitions with a Higher Power’s grand plan for our life.

In the myth about Akhilanda, she rides a crocodile. The crocodile represents our reptilian brain, but it’s also a powerful commentary on what we should do with our problems. Many people think the crocodile masters its prey with strong jaws that kill it…not so! The crocodile actually drags its prey into the river (or into the flow) and spins it senseless (until its broken) and THEN eats it.

If you’re sober today and you’re feeling broken or cracked, embrace that. Lean into it. Because the cracks are where the light flows in. If you’re sober today and you’re working really hard to become some vision of wholeness, release that. Let it go. We are never whole, and that’s a good thing. Because wholeness (by definition) is about limitation. When I am exactly what I’m going to be, I am automatically excluding everything I have yet to become. So again (and I hate this) there’s no destination.

Being broken is the perfect place to start over in our sobriety, because we have lost all expectation of what life is going to become. That’s the first step. It’s surrender. First we surrender to the fact that we are alcoholic and that alcohol makes our life unmanageable (waking up in your own puke, forgetting your mother’s birthday, fill in the blanks.) Then as we get a little freedom from that, instead of working the 1st step, the 1st step starts to work us. We recognize that there are many thing we are powerless over. There are many things that make our life unmanageable. This is how the journey of a few simple steps becomes the journey of a lifetime, and of limitless expansion.

It’s a new year, and I’m feeling a lengthy discussion of the steps (one day at a time) coming on. Happy Sunday.

Dear sober alcoholic, I cannot tell you how keeping in touch will make all the difference in your sober life. And believe me, you’re talking to someone who knows.

One of my WORST traits when I got here (and frankly, if we’re being honest, for years after I arrived) was my complete unwillingness/inability to keep in touch (call you back..or just call in the first place.)

There were a lot of reasons. Some of them were better than others. I had a new baby, I was newly married. I was newly sober (again). I was nuts. I had just made a major move halfway across the country. I didn’t know you. I wasn’t sure I liked you. I wasn’t sure I was staying (in Texas…or married…or in some moments, sober, so what was the point?) What would I say anyway? You get it right? But let me reiterate–WORK THE STEPS OR DIE.

I heard that in a meeting today. Very good, and I like it. Get’s right to the point. It is the WHY of why we do this thing. Essentially, we’re not quite ready to die. Thus, the spiritual path becomes an option. So what does that have to do with the phone and keeping in touch?

We have to share this thing with someone (although I’m pretty sure..and the oldtimers can correct me here if I’m wrong…that the BB doesn’t say anything about a sponsor in the first 164 pages. But yes, you probably still need one, unless you’re Chuck C., which you aren’t, so just get a sponsor please.) We cannot do it alone, and the together part is the best part anyway. There’s nowhere that feels quite like an AA (or NA) meeting to me. These are my people. This is my hometown. The first real roots I ever had were in Alcoholics Anonymous, and they didn’t come easy. It took women telling me that it hurt them when I didn’t call back. It took people telling me they wanted to know me better but I made it very difficult. It took one old lady calling me the ‘ice princess’ and wishing on me that I might melt in AA. Jesus. That’s a lot to absorb when you’re new.

I was mostly afraid. And what I have learned over many years is that the more I call you back the easier it gets. This practice might take several years to get really good at. Then you will find yourself sort of automatically picking up the phone to call someone first. You will be the one to say, hey, I was just thinking of you–BECAUSE YOU WERE. And you know what that means, right? That you weren’t (in that nanosecond) thinking of yourself. And that will feel crazy weird…and then it will kind of make you smile.

Because the not calling, not keeping in touch, not letting yourself be a part of it…it’s really about not feeling good enough inside. It’s about that enormous alcoholic ego coupled with a deep loss of self-esteem. When you get a little self-esteem (it’s easier than it sounds…just start doing esteemable things) what you will realize is what it means to be human, to be a part of, and to be (if even for just a moment) enough.

Sometimes it’s like people only see the worst in me! Volatile? Brooding? Overbearing? That is so judgemental!

I can be difficult at times, I don’t deny that, but as I once told a boyfriend whom I lived with for about 48 1/2 hours, if you think I can be ugly on the outside, you should see what it looks like on my insides.

The truth is, I’m a mixed bag, and it’s been many many years now since I felt that ugly inside. I can be impenetrable and secretive. It’s probably the characteristic (defect perhaps) that I have the least control over. But like most of us, much of what you get from me depends on how you care for me, and of course, most of what you get from me depends on how I am caring for myself at any given time. So TAKE CARE!

I woke up this morning and my first conscious thought was, I’m so glad I’m doing this thing (meaning life.) If you’re having a hard time today, I’m sure you’re thrilled for me that I’m feeling so good. I used to want to vomit when I would hear people talk about how happy they were. That would all be part of my ‘jealous and brooding’ self. One of the ugliest things about me is that I can be belatedly (meaning not right away) happy when those I care for experience something I perceive as a great success. Ugh! It’s so ugly. But in the last several years, it’s slowly gotten better. Let me put it another way, I covet _________________. In other words, any life that’s not my own. It dates back to late 1979 (I was 7!) when I thought that if we could just move into an apartment without the sinfully disgusting puke green shag carpet, my life would get better.

I have a sister. Here she is:

We weren’t raised together (long story!) but we met exactly 20 years ago when she was 11 and I was 18. As you know from reading the blog, I was deeply into my addictions at the time, and I wasn’t afraid to share them with her on the occasion that we might be in the same house at the same time, unsupervised.

My relationship with this young lady has (at times) been a source of great pain. She is hyper-smart. And super confident. And she majored in something like nuclear fuel science. She had a college degree before I rolled out of my own puke, and most relevant perhaps, our father raised her, after he abandoned me. You can guess that the dynamics have been difficult over the years. You bet I coveted her experience in life. I coveted her LIFE! Which led me to cause her great harm at times.

But this weekend, as she shared some of the things she’s feeling and going through, I had a moment of extreme gratitude for my own personal experience (the good and the bad of it!) I realized that this person, who I really love, is suffering a very human exposure to instability and she doesn’t have any of the basic training I’ve gotten in more than 11 years in the program.

What a powerful gift it is to realize that we are driving the bus. This is what sobriety taught me. Regardless of what anyone around me is doing, saying, thinking, feeling…it doesn’t matter. It’s none of my business. Because I can’t control it. I can’t change it. I am the only person I have any control over. The last four years have been what my sister calls ‘the worst 4 years of her life’ due to some shared family dramas. But for me, they have been 4 amazing years spotted with some very bad moments. What a difference in perspectives that is. I have learned not to hold on. We have to let things go. Otherwise they eat us, quite literally, alive.

As we approach 2012, may you let it all go. Letting go makes room for new things. It clears an empty space. It’s like a controlled burn for your soul. Very very important. Otherwise you’re just an overgrown mess full of dead foliage.

Maybe instead of holding on to whatever dramas have invaded our life, what we really need is a new set of care instructions. Maybe setting a few boundaries is in order. Maybe it’s time to let someone know exactly what we need from them and to find out once and for all if that person is capable or has the desire to meet those needs. But maybe, our real happiness depends on our willingness to look for the best in life. Optimism is everything. In hope, there is possibility, promise, excitement. Whatever fills us with anger, resentment, sorrow and grief…we need to let that go, because there is absolutely nothing there for us that can help us in any way at all.

It was 1996, and I wasn’t sober yet. I was living in some really crappy apartment in Chatsworth, California with yet another crazy roommate. Our next door neighbor was a lovely couple–Eve, who worked nights at The Candy Cat (the neighborhood strip club) and her ginormous boyfriend Adam (I’m not even kidding about his name), who worked the door. Our drug dealer lived downstairs and also happened to be my roommate’s ‘sometimes’ boyfriend. I was still slinging drinks in a bar at the time (this was before I was asked to resign my position due to some very nefarious behavior with your credit cards) so as you can imagine, we were one big happy dysfunctional family that hopped from place to place making a career out of staying loaded.

By this time in my life, I had almost none of the friends of my former worlds. I had no relationship left with family of any kind. No one wanted to be around me. It hurt too much. But there was one old friend mine, Marcy, who worked at the bar with me. She kept hangin on–hoping I guess for my redemption. There’s always one isn’t there? One person who refuses to stop believing in our goodness, even when everything we do, everything we say, everything that’s happening provides evidence to the contrary.

I feel so sorry for that person.

I hated Marcy by this time. Though we had once been close friends, the sight of her at this point in my life made my skin crawl. She was tall and thin. She had beautiful long hair and a wide open smile. She drove a brand new Toyota Forerunner and came from a great family. She had two golden retrievers that used to lay by her front door. She was (successfully) enrolled in college. And Marcy was going to ‘be something.’ Every time I saw her, every time she asked me if I was ok, I would cringe inside.

It was like looking in a mirror. It was everything that I wasn’t (and wasn’t ever going to be) staring me in the face. Long story short, we were all at work one night, drinking. We decided to move the party to another location. The crew (who shall remain nameless) consisted of about 7 people in 3 cars. Marcy–who was just kind of tinkering on the outside of this upwardly mobile social circle–was driving alone in 2nd car. We pulled out of the parking lot and just down Topenga Blvd., one of our friends slammed into the back of Marcy’s car and sent it spinning across an intersection into oncoming traffic. She was severely injured. The girl who hit her was arrested (and later convicted) on felony DUI charges, and she went away for about 4 years. But that night (it was actually very early the next morning), this group of hoodlum addicts and alcoholics, rushed to the jail to make sure that our friend made bail. How do you like that? We all went to the jail. No one went to the hospital.

It was a slow downward spiral from there, for me. The self-hate I felt was so severe that I started actively wanting to die. It’s when I took to dying my long stringy hair black. The overalls came out. I stayed loaded from my first waking breath until I could pass out. I lived in the permanent dark world of dingy strip clubs, dive bars. I picked through the carpet for cocaine. I kept the blinds closed, the curtains drawn. There was no laundry happening. No grocery shopping. No calling friends. We got evicted from that apartment. I lost my car. And I hurt a lot more people during this time. If I saw something beautiful, I wanted to destroy it. Can you relate? That includes anything good that might have been left inside me.

I often think of Bill’s story when I think about this time in my life. Because it was the summer of 1996. “The mind and body are marvelous mechanisms, for mine endured this agony two more years.” I wouldn’t draw a sober breath until July of 1998.

We come here with a lot of reasons to hate ourselves. Of all the resentments we may carry, of all the things that are worth writing down and sharing with another immediately, the way we feel about the things we’ve done is the most important thing we can look at. Until we can begin to make peace with the person that we were, there can be no lasting sobriety. Until we can allow the gentleness of healing to begin to take place in us, there is no reason to believe that ‘acting right’ is of any value at all. How does making my bed fix the fact that this sweet harmless girl got in the middle of a line of drunk drivers and lost a couple of years of her life to having to recover from injuries?

I don’t have an answer to that. Or to how, one day at a time I have been able to live in such a way that I am no longer driven to drink by the ghosts that used to haunt me. It is something that happens, perhaps as an outward sign of God’s (or whatever you want to call God) grace for us. Make the metaphorical bed. Write the inventory. Take your seat in the meeting. Carry the message. Clean up the wreckage of your past. Clean up the wreckage of the present moment when and where you can–that means TRY TO MAKE IT BETTER. And don’t ever forget where you came from.

For those of you who still care, the kitchen remodel is basically complete! If you’re wondering what happened to the dog or the dead squirrel, read past postings. JM and I both woke up this morning with cranky lower back pain and stiff necks, but the trauma of leaking pipes inside drywall is essentially over.

I think it’s almost prophetic that in one week my father died, I discovered a crack in the foundation of my house, and leaking pipes secretly corrupting the integrity of my kitchen wall finally overflowed. My father and I had strained relationship. It needed to change in order for me to find peace, and ultimately, that peace came when he died. I don’t understand the man. I probably never will. But I am now free to move on to obsessing about other things…like whether or not I will get into graduate school.

It would have helped had I decided to apply more than 6 weeks before the deadline. But this is kind of how I do it. I work best under pressure. Like having 9 minutes left to finish this blog post before I have to brush my hair (current status: rat’s nest) and leave for work. I think a certain amount of time pressure curbs my natural tendency to overanalyze (read: rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.) When you have 9 minutes (or 6 weeks to complete several parts of an application including a 20 page paper) you just get right to the point. Now that the kitchen is finished it’s time to knock out the rest of the application.

Are you savvy blog readers getting the drift of today’s post yet?

It’s Monday, and I love Mondays. Mondays are about moving on. They’re the new notebook of the week. They’re a brand new ‘to-do’ list (which incidentally, I totally believe can contain already done items just so that you have the immediate satisfaction of crossing things off!) Kitchen trauma over. Dead father. Grad school application. MOVE ON!

Alcoholics (and drug addicts) can make simple things really complicated–such as registering cars, getting insurance, paying tickets, returning phone calls…you get it! Sometimes, what we really need to do is just move on. That’s partly about crossing things off a list. And it’s partly about ditching the drama in favor of finding solutions that work. It’s going to be a good week this week….I can feel it!

For as long as history has recorded the actions of humans, people have felt the need to explain the mystery of life and death and to answer the questions of why we are here and where we are going. It’s man’s search for meaning, and it is quite possibly the thickest and most tangible thing rooting us all to life as we know it.

To the indigenous peoples of Mexico, all of life was understood in duality. Death was an ending, but it was also considered passage onto somewhere new. People would be buried with their most treasured possessions. It was believed they would need them in the hereafter. Like most traditional indigenous celebrations, the history of Dia de los Muertos was shaped by the invasion of the Spanish and their zest for bringing Catholicism to the native people. But the practices and the intent of the day has survived more than 3,500 years to be still celebrated worldwide.

Certainly Dia de los Muertos is a day for remembering the dead, but it is significantly more than that. This poignant and beautiful ritual is also a mockery of death. As the people make preparation, they laugh in the face of the very thing that humans tend to fear most. And there’s something about that which I find both haunting and heartwarming. Kind of like the photo in today’s blog (courtesy of the best husband on the planet, JM, who found it for me on the WWW!)

You see, like many of you, I know what it is to face death. I suffer from a disease that can only end up with me in the grave if it gets hold of me. I didn’t always call it that (a disease) and I don’t usually run around giving it human powers (such as saying, it wants me dead) but from the time that I first read Bill’s story, I felt that I finally understood what might be wrong with me. And there was tremendous relief in that. Here are the things he said that I identified with:

I was a part of life at last.

I forgot the strong warnings…concerning drink.

I fancied myself a leader.

I imagined my talent for leadership would put me at the head of vast enterprises.

The drive for success was on.

At one (bahaha! many many) of the finals I was too drunk to think or write.

(My) friends thought a lunacy commission should be appointed.

I had arrived.

Drink was taking an important and exhilarating part in my life.

My drinking assumed more serious proportions.

There were many unhappy scenes.

Golf (for me it was bartending) permitted drinking every day and night.

As I drank, the old fierce determination to win came back.

I found a job, then lost it (multiple times!)

Liquor ceased to be a luxury; it became a necessity.

Gradually things got worse.

I woke up. This had to be stopped.

This time I meant business.

Shortly afterward I came home drunk.

Was I crazy?

Was I crazy?

Was I crazy?

I truly didn’t know. I thought maybe I was. Sometimes I think I still am. I might sit outside under the sunshine on a perfect fall day and seriously ponder the possibility that I have an undiagnosed mental illness. Yet I’m sober. And I live another day to suit up and show up, just like you taught me to.

On this day, Dia de los Muertos, I celebrate Bill Wilson.

How a girl like me, who got sober more than 50 years after AA began, can find herself in the pages of a story written by an old man, an old banker, and identify her alcoholism there, I will never really understand. It’s a God thing I guess. It’s the thing I am most afraid to trust–that God has a plan; that it’s better than mine; that all is well; I am loved.

So I’m reading Gandhi’s autobiography right now…and I was totally surprised to learn that Gandhi himself (secretly) and for just a brief time was meat eater, or should I say, a meat sneaker! It’s a complex story with all the usual components: peer pressure, envy, persuasion…but the bottom line, he ate meat.

Now he had promised his mother that he wouldn’t touch the stuff. But after getting a little taste of it he quickly discovered how good it was and found himself doing battle with the old dog inside hounding him to gobble up some animal flesh.

Sounds like heresy, right? I mean we all know Gandhi was a vegetarian, and besides that, a pre-eminent political and ideological leader. During the Indian independence movement, Gandhi built and taught satyagraha, or resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience. It was a philosophy later employed by Dr. Martin Luther King among others, to rebuff the cruelties of segregation in the United States.

Satyagraha is founded in ahimsa, or total nonviolence. This is where the vegetarian thing came into play. No harm to animals through eating, killing, abusing them.

I guess I find it interesting because I still walk into a parking lot and smell steak or chicken cooking and find myself craving meat (I’ve been vegetarian for about 5 months now). I sometimes wonder when or if that feeling will leave me. And I feel guilty for craving it. I remember feeling that way about alcohol. But when I read this part of Gandhi’s autobiography, I realized that even this man, this great soul and spiritual leader of people, had this very human and carnal want inside of him. Even he was susceptible to pressure from others and to the idea of how others might perceive him.

He found it hard to eat while he was in London (by this time he was a devout, and from the sounds of it, kind of neurotic vegetarian.) He hated the blandness of the food and missed the sweetness and the spiciness of the foods he had grown up with in India and in his mother’s home. But he later relates, “As my mind has taken a different turn, the fondness for condiments has worn away and I now relish the boiled spinach” which I used to find so distasteful.

What is most profound to me is that he goes on to say, “Many such experiments taught me that the real seat of taste was not the tongue but the mind.”

And that’s where this whole thing comes back to the condition of my …ism. Many of my experiments, both loaded and sober, have proved that if I don’t recognize how cunning and powerful my mind can be, I will never have any freedom from it. I have to learn to practice silence and stillness. Even though I often resist those things and find them uncomfortable.

From Gandhi’s lips to your ears, “Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of…truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary in order to surmount it.”

These dishonest tendencies are true for me. Whether it’s my head telling me to go on and take a drink or dig into some fried chicken. The power of my mind to convince me to go against my own principles and beliefs is quite strong. In silence I cultivate a different kind of power…an endurance so to speak. And it is this endurance that helps me see all of my life and its situations more clearly.

I’m Nina and I’ve been itching to start a recovery blog forever! I’ll have
11 years of continuous sobriety on September 11, 2011 (that’s like any day now!) and I got sober at Radford Hall in North Hollywood, the old-fashioned way…I shook until I stopped shaking, I stayed awake until I fell asleep, and I drank more coffee in my first year than I probably have since. I went to meetings where there were hot guys (I was 25) and strong coffee…and cake. If you know me…you know I love my cake! My original sobriety date was July 7, 1998. Obviously, I had a pretty bad 4th of July that year. It ended in Lake Havasu with me in handcuffs being interviewed (if you can really call it that) by the local authorities.

If you’re any good at math, you can tell I stayed sober just a little over 2 years and then got loaded. I don’t think I ‘slipped’ onto that line of Speed or fell into the bottle of Sierra Nevada, though I did shamefully claim both for awhile. I was as physically
sober then as I will ever be. But I decided to react alcoholically to the conditions of my life. It was a big F-you to my sobriety. What a child I was. I was still burning with resentment and had just discovered that life still happens, even when you’re
sober.

I love recovery—it means (according to Webster) getting back something you have lost. Did you know that? And there are guarantees ( I’m a big fan of guaranttees): If we don’t drink, we won’t get drunk. It’s that simple. So just stay; that’s the deal. But the deal is also that when you just stay sober one day at a time, the days turn into weeks, turn into months,turn into years, and before you know it–things are happening! We can do anything here. It’s like getting a 2nd life—it’s grand!

It’s a simple gig, but not easy. It just takes changing everything basically. It means learning to let life turn you inside out, upside down, to open yourself to the path, to shed layers of ego and ‘who you think you are’ like the dead skin from a bad facial peel…it’s
a lot. I give you that.

But there’s something magical too, something that happens in that sticky mushy place where you’re learning to show up for
your life; how to clean the blinds in the house without being hopped up on Meth or grocery shop without a bong hit, or fuck without a drink, or sleep without a pill. There’s something that happens as you learn to say things (odd things…things you never thought you’d say) like: You might be right; Yes, I’d love to go; How can I help?

I’m looking forward to sharing this sobriety thing with you. Settle in and become a part of it. . This thing belongs to all of us, and none of us. We have to keep it that way, because that’s why it works.